T-SQL Tuesday #51 – Place Your Bets

T-SQL Tuesday is a recurring blog party, that is started by Adam Machanic (Blog | @AdamMachanic). Each month a blog will host the party, and everyone that want’s to can write a blog about a specific subject.

This month the subject is “Place Your Bets”. If you want to read the opening post, please click the image below to go to the party-starter: Jason Brimhall (Blog | @sqlrnnr).

When I read about this months T-SQL Tuesday topic, the first thing that came to mind was things that you know will go wrong sooner or later. When you encounter a situation like this, you immediately know this can’t last forever. You want to fix it when you see it, but there’s no money, or there’s no time at that moment. But they promise you, in a few weeks you can take all the time you need. Well, that’ll never happen. Until things go wrong, and you can clean up the mess. Sounds familiar? Yes, we’ve all seen this, or will see this sooner or later.

With power comes great responsibility
Just imagine this with me. One of your colleagues asks you to look at a problem he’s having with a script someone in your company wrote. You probably solved it while he was standing right next to you. He watches you solve the problem, and when it’s solved, he walks away with a thousand-yard stare in his eyes. You don’t really think about it when it happens, but it’ll come to you…

A few weeks later, it’s 10 AM and you’re still having your first coffee of the day, the same developer asks you to look at “his script”. Wait, what?! Yes, he watched you work your magic, and that funny language of “Es-Que-El” seemed easy to learn. So he bought himself a “SQL Server for dummies”, learned all he needs to know in only a weekend, and wonders why it took you so long to learn it. From now on, he can write his own scripts, so he doesn’t need you anymore. Except for this last time.

Opening the script scares you: it’s a cursor. But in your frustration and amazement you “fix” the broken script, by refactoring his select statement in the cursor. Because the cursor only collects data, you add a “TOP 10” clause in the select statement, and run the script as test. Nice, it finishes is 25 seconds. “It will only consume 500 rows” is the last thing you heard him say. You send the guy off, so you can continue your own work.

Later in the day, it’s about 4 PM, you meet the same guy at the coffee machine. He starts a discussion about how he needs a new PC, because the script YOU wrote is slow (see where this is going…?). It’s running for about 4 hours now, while it should only collect about 500 records. I know what you think: that’s impossible. You walk with him to his desk, stop the script, and look at his code. That isn’t the query you looked at this morning. Asking your colleague about it explains it all: he “slightly refactored” the script, because he didn’t need al those weird statements to get him his results. Well, after a fiery discussion of a few minutes, you explain him the DOES need the “FETCH NEXT” in the query, because the query now ran the same statement for only the first record in the select statement you declared for your cursor.

So this funny “Es-Que-El” language, isn’t that easy to learn. A beautiful quote about that, and I’m not sure who said that, says: “T-SQL is easy to learn, but hard to master”. So putting your money on one horse, in this case buying yourself a book, isn’t a good idea.

Putting your money on one color
Another great example is a company that had a wonderful Business Intelligence environment. They used the whole nine yards: SQL Server, SSIS, SSAS, SSRS, etc. The downside of that you ask? It was all hosted on 1 physical machine, on a single SQL Server instance. Oh, and it was running low on disk space, and there was no room in the chassis to put in extra disks. That’s right: it was like juggling burning chainsaws with only one hand. Or an interesting challenge, if you will.

Eventually we hosted a few databases on NAS volumes. At that point, I was told the databases we moved were less important. Pro tip: never EVER trust them when they say that!!! They forgot to tell me the biggest database of the moved databases wasn’t in the backup plan (500 GB database takes a long time to backup), and the last backup was made over a year ago. Surprise, one night the network card failed for maybe only a microsecond, and SQL Server thought the LUN was offline or the disk crashed. So SQL Server said that the database was corrupt, and that the datafiles were unavailable. After a few hours, a reboot of the server fixed it, and SQL Server could see the disk volumes again. So the database was saved after all.

But you see where I’m going with this? You never know when things go wrong, and putting all your money on one color when playing roulette isn’t the best idea. If the hardware of your single server fails, you fail.

Next, Next, Finish?
But the biggest example I can give you of a bad placed bet, are companies that work with SQL Server, but don’t hire a DBA. Have you ever worked for a company that work with Oracle? Every single company that works with Oracle, has a dedicated Oracle DBA. But have you ever wondered why that isn’t the case when a company works with SQL Server?

Thinking about it, I guess this is because a successful SQL Server installation is only a few “Next, Next, Finish”-mouse clicks away. So if the installation is so easy, every developer or person with IT experience can administer it probably. They couldn’t be more wrong. You know that, I know that, every SQL Server professional knows that, but try to convince other people of that fact.

So the worst bet you can place, and this is how I write myself back to the subject of this month, is not hiring a professional to manage your data and data stores. You wouldn’t let your local baker fix your car, because the wrote some books about cars, right? So why do you let a developer with basic knowledge near your SQL Server? Just because real DBA’s cost money? Yes, we do cost some serious money. But in the end, at least when you hire a GOOD DBA, they will make you money. You don’t think so? What does a DBA cost per hour? And how much money do you lose when your servers are down for just an hour?